Diet culture refers to a rigid set of expectations about valuing thinness and attractiveness over physical health and emotional well-being. Diet culture often emphasizes “good” versus “bad” foods, focuses on calorie restriction, and normalizes self-deprecating talk. Diet culture is toxic, and it can be a risk factor for body dysmorphia, disordered eating, and other mental health issues.
What Is Diet Culture?
Diet culture involves the preoccupation with physical appearance coupled with adhering to “perfect” eating standards. Diet culture can include obsessive discussions about calorie limits, types of foods consumed, exercise expectations, and other methods used to lose weight.1
“Diet culture appears in both the largest and tiniest crevices of society. It attaches the way we look, what we eat, and even what exercises we do, to moral virtue,” explains Emma Laing, PhD, RDN, LD, FAND, Clinical Associate Professor and Director of Dietetics at the University of Georgia. “A thin or fit appearance symbolizes important values in our culture, like hard work and discipline. Therefore, if a person is not perceived as thin, the assumption is that they must lack self-discipline and have poor willpower… and as a result they experience harmful stigmatization. Weight stigma tends to be socially acceptable in diet culture and can be observed in the workplace, in schools, at home, and even among healthcare professionals.”8
Diet culture can exist anywhere, although it often trends in western-influenced societies. It’s prevalent in affluent areas where one’s image often becomes synonymous with status and power. Moreover, it can be common among adolescents and young adults, who tend to emphasize appearance over physical health.2
“Diet culture is ubiquitous, we experience it in advertisements, television, movies and comedy, social media, at work, at the doctor’s office, and in conversations with colleagues, family, and friends,” says Ragen Chastain, speaker, writer, and activist of Sized for Success. “Diet culture manifests itself in the inequalities that fat people experience in everything from accommodation in public spaces to healthcare.”9
Examples of Diet Culture
Diet culture can be insidious, mainly because it often is lumped in with suggestions about optimal nutrition and disease prevention. However, it’s important to understand that diet culture extends beyond eating nourishing foods and taking care of your physical health. Diet culture can quickly become a consuming lifestyle that compromises your physical and emotional well-being.
Examples of diet culture include:
- Labeling foods as good or bad
- Exercising to “burn off” a specific amount of calories or to “earn a treat”
- Limiting or avoiding entire food groups for being “bad” (e.g., carbohydrates, dairy, sugar)
- Feeling guilt or shame for eating
- Attempting to suppress your appetite with caffeine, nicotine, skinny teas, or water
- Avoiding certain social situations to avoid eating
- Feeling unworthy or unattractive due to your body
- Weighing yourself and changing your behaviors based on the number on the scale
- Worshiping thinness and weight loss
- Assuming that your body is responsible for good or bad things happening
- Engaging in fat shaming or body shaming behaviors or talk
- Feeling envious of others for their weight or perceived self-control
How Is Diet Culture Harmful to Someone’s Mental Health?
Diet culture can trigger enormous feelings of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and fear. At the same time, it can put weight loss and diets on a massive pedestal. As a result, you may assume you’re “failing” if you can’t adhere to such rigid standards.
Laing states, “Feeling stigmatized for any reason can lead to stress, higher risks for chronic disease, and avoidance of healthcare—and weight stigma has been specifically linked to avoidance of exercise, inability to self-regulate appetite, mood and anxiety disorders, eating disorder symptoms, and even to all-cause mortality. What’s more, people who fall into the pattern of weight cycling, after attempting diet after restrictive diet, might end up gaining more weight than if they had never dieted at all.”
Diet culture can negatively impact your mental health by:
- Fueling anxiety symptoms and signs (e.g., obsessing about what you should or shouldn’t eat, planning your following meals, ruminating over “mistakes” you made with eating)
- Increasing feelings of guilt and shame
- Affecting your relationships
- Discouraging you from taking important risks or trying new activities because you don’t feel like you have the “right appearance” for it
- Engaging in dangerous solutions like drugs, alcohol, laxatives, purging, or overexercising to compensate for eating
- Distracting you from work, school, or other responsibilities
Chastain mentions, “The incessant incantation that thinner bodies are better bodies is rooted in anti-Blackness and harms people of all sizes, but harms those in the largest bodies and those with multiple marginalized identities the most, telling them early and often that they are less worthy. It deludes people into believing that fat bodies are open to public scrutiny, judgment, and comment, and incites the stigmatizing, bullying, and oppression of fat people including being excluded from public spaces and/or asked to pay more for the same services, being hired, paid, and promoted less, and being unable to access competent, bigotry-free healthcare.”
Diet Culture & Eating Disorders
While diet culture is not solely responsible for causing eating disorders, it can undoubtedly exacerbate these issues. Similarly, because so many young people are exposed to diet culture, they may be more susceptible to engaging in dangerous weight-loss tactics, which can trigger the development of bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, binge eating disorder, or “otherwise specified feeding or eating disorder” (OSFED).
Research shows that dieting, while common, can be harmful. For example, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) reports that 35% of dieting becomes obsessive, and 20-25% of dieting measures turn into eating disorders.3
When to Talk to a Therapist & When to Seek Medical Help
Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses that often require professional treatment. Next to opioid overdoses, they are among the deadliest mental illnesses, with an individual dying every 52 minutes from related causes. In addition, over a quarter of people with eating disorders attempt suicide.4Disordered eating can quickly become problematic and life-threatening.
Below are warning signs that often warrant the need for professional support:5
- Worsening preoccupation with weight, food, and calories
- Increasingly feeling uncomfortable eating or eating around others
- Chewing and spitting out food
- Vomiting after meals
- Compulsively exercising with or without modifying food intake
- Presence of physical changes (e.g., stomach cramps, acid reflux, missed periods, body temperature changes, dental problems, brittle nails, fine hair on the body)
- Dramatic weight changes
- Hoarding, stealing, or secretly eating food due to shame
- Difficulties focusing on work, school, or relationships
- Worsening depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts
Eating disorder treatment often requires a multidisciplinary approach. In severe cases of malnourishment, you may need a brief period of hospitalization. After achieving stabilization, most people benefit from a combination of therapy, medication, and nutrition support.
8 Tips on How to Resist Diet Culture
In a society that bombards people with numerous messages about body image and thinness, resisting diet culture can be tricky. That said, challenging the status quo can help you feel healthier and happier.
Here are eight tips to consider if you’re ready to say no to diet culture:
1. Reflect On How You Give Into Diet Culture
Almost everyone is a victim of this phenomenon. But if you want to resist diet culture, you have to be aware of its role in your life. Consider spending a week writing down the times you engage in diet-culture behavior. For example, note when you reject a specific food for being “unhealthy” or make an automatic assumption about someone over their size.
Chastain states, “We can acknowledge that diet culture profits from products that fail the vast majority of the time, creating repeat business. Dieting doesn’t make most people thinner or healthier (two separate things) but does make tremendous wealth for its purveyors.”
The goal of this self-awareness exercise isn’t to judge yourself. Instead, it’s to increase your insight and start recognizing your diet culture triggers and patterns. Having this insight is paramount for making necessary changes.
Laing suggests, “Debunk the idea that thinner bodies are more disciplined, healthier, and more worthy of attention—you have no idea how ‘healthy’ someone is by just looking at them. Indicators such as blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol levels can improve in response to a health intervention regardless of changes in weight.”
2. Stop Labeling Foods or Behaviors
Try to avoid using the words like cheat, treat, healthy, clean, or indulge. These words are emotionally charged, and they can create inherent messages about how and what you eat. Instead, aim to be more neutral. Food doesn’t have any moral value—it is simply a source of energy. As you learn to release these preconceived labels, food feels less powerful.
Laing says, “Appreciate that the concept of ‘health’ includes mental health as well as other aspects beyond body size. A positive relationship with food can have a positive impact on mental health. While nutrition is of course an aspect that is important to health, food should bring us together in ways that are also important to our wellbeing, such as connection, culture, satisfaction, and joy.”
3. Find Healthy Role Models
Try to limit exposing yourself to images that focus on an unrealistic beauty standard. To achieve this goal, you may need to cut down on social media or television consumption.
Instead, try to find real-life people who inspire you, and don’t focus on how their bodies look. Instead, focus on the energy they radiate. How do they carry themselves throughout the day? How do they leave people feeling? What messages can you learn from them to implement in your own life?
4. Avoid Body-Bashing
When was the last time a friend told you that she loved how their legs looked? Or, that they felt so attractive in their new bathing suit? Chances are that this kind of self-praise has never happened. If it did, you might have even felt confused or judgmental by this action.
To resist diet culture, you need to resist body-bashing conversations. You can model this behavior by avoiding criticizing your body in front of others (and to yourself). For example, if a friend starts complaining about their appearance, you can validate their feelings, but aim to gently shift the conversation—if they persist, it might be a sign of a toxic friend.
Chastain urges, “We can refuse to engage in, and push back against, negative body talk to help create a world where bodies of all sizes are celebrated. We can acknowledge that health isn’t an obligation, barometer of worthiness, or entirely within our control and focus on creating access and information, using paradigms like Fat Acceptance, Health at Every Size, and Intuitive Eating.”
5. Stop Engaging In Fad or Crash Diets
Weight loss is a staggering $72 billion industry,6and yet an overwhelming amount of research shows that weight-loss diets don’t work in the long-term.7
Fad or crash diets can adversely affect your metabolism and trigger more hunger, food obsession, and depressing thoughts. Instead, if you need to change your diet for medical reasons, consult with a qualified physician or registered dietitian.
6. Try Intuitive Eating
Intuitive eating refers to listening to your body to guide you into how and what to eat. The premise is simple: follow your hunger cues, and you will eat the right foods in the right amounts. If you ever need to see intuitive eating in action, just watch a toddler throughout the day.
One day, they may love vegetables and fruits. Next, they might insist on only eating crackers and chicken. With intuitive eating, there is no right-or-wrong. Everything balances itself out.
Intuitive eating shuns disordered eating by largely avoiding anything to do with food groups, calorie counts, or emotional eating. This practice can take time, especially since many people unknowingly engage in diet culture. You have to dedicate yourself to relearning your body’s needs and honoring them.
7. Embrace Meaningful Movement
Moving your body regularly is optimal for your overall health. But exercise shouldn’t be associated with punishment. It also shouldn’t be a qualifier, determining whether you eat- or what you eat that day.
Try to focus on building a positive relationship with your body. What kinds of activities feel good to you? How do you enjoy moving your body and honoring your strength? Hone in on listening to your body’s cues. If something really hurts, don’t keep pushing. Similarly, if you feel like you need to rest, listen to that message. Your body knows what it needs!
8. Make Life Goals That Aren’t Related to Your Body
Obtaining the “perfect body” shouldn’t be your life’s work! Even if you achieve specific body-related goals, such achievements are not synonymous with increased happiness. While it’s perfectly reasonable to value your health, spend time considering your other priorities—including strengthening relationships, participating in enjoyable hobbies, and engaging in meaningful work—and focus on pursuing them.
Finally, commit to stop waiting! Stop waiting to be a certain size to try new activities or commit to new goals. This is your life; stop waiting for it to begin!
Final Thoughts on Diet Culture
Diet culture represents an ongoing problem in modern society, and it doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon. Unfortunately, participating in diet culture may exacerbate feelings of depression, anxiety, and shame. By rejecting the status quo and choosing to love yourself and your body, you can harness a greater sense of fulfillment.
Diet Culture Infographics
